Season 3 Episode 2: Navigating Endometrial Cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic

Welcome to the second episode of the Season 3 GOSH Podcast! Today we are featuring Helen Epstein, endometrial cancer survivor and the author of the book “Getting Through It: My Year of Cancer During Covid”. In this episode, Helen talks about her experiences navigating endometrial cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic and her motivation behind writing the book.   

Helen Epstein is the author, co-author, translator or editor of ten books of narrative nonfiction. She became a journalist at the age of 20 and became the first tenured woman journalism professor at New York University, teaching about 1000 students over 12 years. She guest lectures extensively at universities, libraries, and religious institutions in North America and abroad. Just after Covid arrived in North America, journalist Helen Epstein was diagnosed with endometrial cancer — one of a predicted 66,570 new cases of cancer of the uterine body in the United States in 2021. Helen wrote a memoir called “Getting Through It”, a candid and eye-opening account of a medical steeplechase of surgery, chemo, and radiation therapy, bringing together reporting, research, and elements of memoir to tell an important story. 

Helen's book "Getting Through It: My Year of Cancer during Covid ": 

https://plunkettlakepress.com/gti  

Learn more about Helen’s works: 

http://www.helenepstein.com/  

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For more information on the Gynecologic Cancer Initiative, please visit https://gynecancerinitiative.ca/ or email us at info@gynecancerinitiative.ca 

Where to learn more about us: 

Twitter – @GCI_Cluster

Instagram – @gynecancerinitiative

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For more information on the Gynecologic Cancer Initiative, please visit https://gynecancerinitiative.ca/ or email us at info@gynecancerinitiative.ca

Where to learn more about us:
Twitter – @GCI_Cluster
Instagram – @gynecancerinitiative
Facebook – facebook.com/gynecancerinitiative
TikTok – @gci_gosh

Transcript

SPEAKERS 

Helen, Nicole, Stephanie 

 
SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

Cancer patient, survivorship, cancer survivor, gynecological cancers, oncology, British Columbia, podcast, cancer treatment, chemotherapy, side effects, mental health, support, fertility, cancer advocacy, awareness, cancer patient journey, resources, COVID19, pandemic, endometrial cancer 

00:00:01 Introduction 

Thanks for listening to the GOSH podcast. GOSH stands for the Gynecologic Oncology Sharing Hub, an open space for real and evidence-based discussions on gynecologic cancers. We'll share the stories of gyne cancer patients and survivors and hear from researchers and clinicians who are working behind the scenes to improve the lives of people with gynecologic cancers. Our podcast is produced and recorded on traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. It is produced by the Gynecologic Cancer Initiative, a province-wide initiative in British Columbia with a mission to accelerate transformative research and translational practice on the prevention, detection, treatment, and survivorship of gynecologic cancers. 

Hi, I'm Nicole Keay, and I'm Stephanie Lam and you're listening to the GOSH, podcast.  

00:00:58 Nicole 

All right! Hi everyone! Thanks for joining the GOSH podcast. We're very excited today. We have Helen Epstein joining the show. She is the author, co-author, translator or editor of ten books of narrative nonfiction. She became a journalist at the age of 20 and became the first tenured woman journalism professor in New York University, teaching about 1000 students over 12 years. She guest lectures extensively at universities, libraries and religious institutions in North America and abroad. Just after Covid arrived in North America, Helen was diagnosed with endometrial cancer — one of a predicted 66,570 new cases of cancer of the uterine body in the United States in 2021. Helen wrote a memoir called “Getting Through It”, a candid and eye-opening account of a medical steeplechase of surgery, chemo and radiation therapy, bringing together reporting, research and elements of memoir to tell an important story. 

00:02:03 Nicole 

Welcome to the show Helen. Thanks for joining us today. Why don't we get started with you telling us a little bit about yourself and your cancer journey? 

00:02:16 Helen 

Well, I am a mother and a grandmother as well as a professional journalist. I live in Lexington, Massachusetts, which is outside of Boston. My journey starts just before COVID. I was about to embark on a book tour which was very exciting. I was going to go not only all over the United States, but also to Europe and I was very excited about it. My pap (pap smear) date was March 12th. And of course, just about that time, COVID exploded in Boston with the Biogen Conference, which you may remember. Though all bets were off. I was not particularly fixated on my medical appointments because I enjoyed very good health all my life and never had any major problems. Uhm, the last time I had had an operation was when I broke my arm when I was seven years old. So, I was not thinking medical at all. 

COVID was very scary here because we were among the first cities that really got slammed. And so, when it came to my medical appointments I canceled. All of them. I canceled my eye doctor. I canceled the dentist. I cancelled my routine gynecological tests. 

Now the reason I had routine gynecological tests apart from mammogram. My uterine tests, I had been having them for about 30 years because I'm one of the many women who has fibroids or had fibroids. I had four of them and one of them was extremely large. So, for years my gynecologist had been prescribing trans vaginal ultrasounds for two reasons, one was to measure the growth of the fibroids and the second one was to make sure that nothing else was growing in there. But since nothing ever looked strange or abnormal, I figured there's no big deal. I haven't had anything for 30 years that was unusual, so why would I have it now? 

I was very scared about COVID. I did not like the idea of my hospitals and the places where I get my tests are in Austin and I knew there'd be a lot of people there. I did not want to be exposed to strangers, so I cancelled. 

00:05:01 Nicole 

Wow, so I mean navigating that during the pandemic, like navigating cancer at the best of times is a challenge but navigating that during COVID. I mean How did that go for you? 

00:05:20 Helen 

Well, what happened next was. Nobody questioned my canceling of my routine ultrasound yeah. And then about I don't know how much later. Maybe a couple of weeks after I noticed a blood streak in my panties when I went to the bathroom. Being an informed contemporary woman, I knew that blood in your bum after menopause was not a good thing. That it generally had something to do with cancer, so I immediately called up my gynecologist. Now I hadn't seen my gynecologist for a while because at that point I was 72 years old. I was long post-menopausal, and my regular doctor had taken over my gynecological exams. But I also knew enough to know that I needed a gynecologist. So, I called up the gynecologist and luckily. Because of COVID and because everyone else had canceled their appointments, I got an appointment pretty much the next day. So then ensued this extremely bizarre series of appointments because there was no one on the road. I would drive to the appointment; the highway was empty. I would go into the institution, the medical facility. There was nobody there. This all like Edward Hopper's paintings (Edward Hopper was an American realist painter. His paintings highlight themes of isolation and loneliness). Desolation. Medical desolation. So, I go GYN. She immediately says, well, you have to have your transvaginal ultrasound. I go to get a transvaginal ultrasound. Same thing. 

I'm in the middle of the city. No cars, no people, no nothing. Hand, lotion masks. Everybody staying as far away as they can, while giving me a transvaginal ultrasound, which is quite a feat. I have the ultrasound. I get a call back from the gynecologist saying “There's a thickening of the uterine lining. You have to have a biopsy”. Same thing, I go back to the medical facility. Nobody is there. I have my biopsy, and all of this happened very, very quickly. There was no time to be anxious because everything was happening at high speed. I got a call back very soon. As soon as the gynecologist got the results that I did have endometrial cancer. At that point, they only knew what kind it was. Of course, I had no idea what any of that meant, but she said you need to see a surgeon immediately. 

And again, because of COVID, I saw a surgeon two days later at MGH in Boston, which is the largest facility in Boston. It usually it's like a small city, you know. Usually, it's just teeming with people and this time again there were very few people. There are more staff than patients and I got to see this wonderful doctor and Catherine Goodman who is an oncological surgeon and also a women's rights activist, who works internationally with women. So that was right up my alley. I was very, very happy about that. So, she was the one who broke the news about the kind of cancer I had now. I knew nothing about cancer pretty much before this. I didn't know that there were three types of endometrial cancer. Uhm, I did I knew sort of about stages. Because I had heard enough from friends who had various stages of various kinds of cancers, but she explained to me that she couldn't tell me what stage I had at this point. But she could tell me that according to the biopsy, the kind of cancer I had was serous. 

And she told me that serous cancer was grade three, that it was the most serious kind of cancer and that it behaved very much like ovarian cancer and that really scared me. And the reason that really scared me was, of course, had seen and read many of the representations of ovarian cancer in the media. I had seen the movie and the play “Wit”, which was about this English professor who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Then I had also read a long time ago, the memoir by Gilda Radner, the American comedian who died of ovarian cancer. So that was very scary. 

00:10:35 Stephanie 

Yeah, I can't imagine how challenging it was to go through. Do you paint such a telling picture of how the pandemic impacted cancer care. I guess one of the consequences of it was all the cancellations of preventative appointments. We talked a lot about mental health during the pandemic. And as Nicole mentioned, you know it's challenging enough to go through cancer. How did you navigate your mental health throughout this entire process? This entire journey that you've gone through, especially during the pandemic. 

00:11:16 Helen 

Well, I just realized when you asked me that I left out a major part of this. My husband my partner drove me to all these appointments, but he wasn't allowed to enter the facility. So that had many ramifications. The first one that comes to mind is you just really are alone. You can't hold anyone's hand. You can't draw sustenance from a companion of any kind. You can't have a friend there; you can't have a relative there, you can't have your partner there. 

Yeah, the other problem, which I had not anticipated even being a journalist, was the kind of shock you go into when you have a diagnosis first and then second the shock you go into when you get hit with all this unfamiliar information. So typically, under normal non COVID circumstances you have a companion who's a backup to you and can take notes and can ask the questions that would seem obvious to you, were you not in a state of shock. 

So, I was alone, and I am a journalist by trade, so you'd think that I'm a good notetaker and that I'm really on the ball. In terms of assimilating new information, but in fact the shock of getting adopted cancer diagnosis is so great that it scrambles your mind. No matter who you are or what the training is. Now I'm lucky the hospital, being really, really smart, had a plan for this kind of thing. 

So, they had the companion to the patient go to the garage, then to the roof of the garage which was next door to the hospital, and there was good Wi-Fi there. They would have the companion and patch in to the by phone by iPhone through the console. So even though my spouse was not in the room with me he was on the roof of the garage next door, and he could take notes from there. Now that of the course introduces a whole bunch of other issues into the... You know, if you're if you're with your companion and they're talking too much, you can say let me handle this. But of course, if they're on the roof of a garage and you can't see them them. That makes things more difficult. So, I told my partner before we went in that I wanted him to keep quiet until the end and then he could ask all the questions he wanted. He took great notes. I have to say he's very good. 

00:14:06 Stephanie 

Huh, yeah, I mean, I think you raised such a great point because on this podcast alone we talk so much about the importance of having an advocate. You know, Nicole, you've mentioned it so many times through your experience and through all of the other patients who we've spoken. Just that important role of having someone next to you to ask everything and to take in everything that is just too much to handle. So, I think the pandemic definitely impacted that so much. And you know, I'm really glad to hear that the hospital was able to make some sort of accommodation to help patients do that. And they recognize that that was such a big unintended consequence of the of the pandemic, right? 

00:14:53 Helen 

Right and I have to say I was really tickled because when I discussed this with other people who were diagnosed with cancer during the pandemic, a couple of them who were married said that they would never take their husband. That their husbands couldn't handle it and they chose instead a friend or relative, or in one case their housekeeper. Wow, twisted. 

Yeah, it doesn't have to be your partner, it can be anyone who you feel comfortable with when you feel is reliable or it can also be a team of people. So that's important to think about, especially if you don't have a partner. 

00:15:35 Stephanie 

Same here. 

00:15:40 Nicole 

Yeah, absolutely. Really from my experience I found like they'd tell me information and then it was just like I couldn't absorb. I think that the shock level that you're speaking to is absolutely, like you just hit a point. It was like in one ear and out the other. So having a person regardless of who they are whether they're taking notes or can absorb that information and be able to support however you need, it's just so, so key. 

Now in your memoir, you talk about your husband and I'm curious how did your cancer diagnosis or going through that journey impact your relationship? Or did it at all? 

00:16:27 Helen 

Oh, I think it's impossible for cancer experience not to impact every relationship. I was very lucky. In that my I have a very peculiar husband. My husband is very much an engineer. He's very much a numbers person and he's extremely reliable and he also absolutely is in awe of the medical profession. Most of these things are completely contrary to who I am. I am skeptical of everything. I am not a numbers person. I am a story person. I'm a writer. I'm not a scientist, so we complemented each other very very nicely in this regard and I was really pleased that he stepped up to the plate and he really was there for me. He was there for me in ways that I really needed and that I didn't even know I needed. For example, he kept track of all of the data which I could not keep track of. When it came to taking pills, he kept track of the pills. Uhm, when it came to figuring out periods between appointments or between pills, or between hydration, he would do all of that. So, I was really, really fortunate in that regard. 

I would say that the cancer experience really strengthened our relationship. If you read the memoir, you know that in the middle I had, I had all three treatments. I had surgery. I had chemotherapy, and I had radiation. But on top of those three things, I had a stroke. In the first cycle of chemotherapy, which apparently is not uncommon in gynecological cancer. They are still doing research on this, but apparently, gynecological cancer does sometimes result in blood clots and those blood clots sometimes result in strokes. That was the case with me. So, my poor husband not only had to go through cancer. But one day at breakfast I stopped talking and one side of my face started drooping and when he asked do we live in Massachusetts or Shanghai? I said nothing, so he called 911 and had to go to the hospital. He was not allowed to go inside and had to go through all that. So, I think in a sense he has more post-traumatic stress disorder than I do because for example. I don't remember. Most of that. 

I do remember chemo. I do remember surgery. I do remember radiation, but I don't remember the strokes. I think that's another point I'd like to stress as how hard this whole experience is on the caretaker, so you better choose one who really is strong and can withstand the stress. 

00:19:55 Nicole 

We've talked about the impacts in a few different episodes that caretakers have had, and I think we have yet to have a caretaker on the episode. 

00:20:08 Helen 

Well, I recommend my husband up to this. 

00:20:14 Nicole 

Great, but it's such a journey that they go through and their mental health and of finding the right supports for them I think is also a really the key aspect and a healthy one that I would encourage anyone who is playing that caretaking role to find for themselves. 

00:20:36 Stephanie 

Yeah, yeah, that's so important. I yeah we have worked with a couple family partners and so you know caretakers whose loved ones have passed away from a gynecological cancer. And you know they continue to be such important advocates. You know Healthcare is such a complex system in any country that you're in that you know just having just the process of trying to navigate that in it of itself can be so challenging and. Let alone the physical and mental and emotional elements of a cancer diagnosis. 

So, at the Gynecological Cancer Initiative we talk a lot about life after cancer. So what we call cancer survivorship and how it's really important to think about the whole person when we're talking about a diagnosis, so I'm curious what has your experience been navigating life after cancer treatment? 

00:21:44 Helen 

Well, I guess the 1st thing that I felt when it was over was relief because it was such a protracted process, even though everything went really, really quickly. I imagined that my experience took about half the time as most people experience, it was really strenuous. I mean, first there was the diagnosis. Luckily, as I said, I didn't have much time to get anxious about it because before I knew it I had an appointment with the surgeon and I had my diagnosis and I had a surgery date. So that didn't give me too much time to worry about anything. 

What I really had to do was try to figure out how I was going to organize my life.  I thought let's do one thing at a time. So I had the surgery. The surgery was laparoscopic, which was wonderful. I know people who've had, which we call it hysterectomies and many of them had hysterectomies before laparoscopy and so they had very, very large incisions and they had very long recovery times. With laparoscopy the incisions are so small and recovery time is quite quick. I didn't believe how quickly I'd recover I mean for me, surgery was by far the least scary and the least difficult part of treatment. I didn't have to take prescription drugs once I left the hospital and I left the hospital the day after and that was only because my surgery was late in the afternoon, and they couldn't discharge me in time. So that was good. 

Rate the second part was finding out the extent of the diagnosis and that, of course, is a very difficult thing for many women. My stage was 1A, which meant that the cancer had not even permeated through the endometrial lining. It was only halfway through. So, I wasn't too worried about that, but because so again, you know I didn't have the anxiety that a lot of women have at that point, trying to figure out if they have stage three or four, how far the cancer has spread, and what their chances are. 

I kind of thought 1A sounds really small to me. So, I'm not going to give it any thought at all. What did worry me was the serous was grade 3 because my gynecologist surgeon made it very clear that this was a “sneaky” kind of cancer and that she could not be sure that she had gotten it all and that I would have to have chemotherapy and radiation. So that was scary. 

But it wasn't as scary as If I thought that it had already spread all over the place. 

So then came chemo. I found chemo extremely difficult. I did not do well with it, even with all the medications they give you now. Uhm, as you know it used to be much, much, much worse than it is now, and now they control nausea with medication, and they control fatigue with medication, they control everything. But even with all these things, I found it extremely difficult because I'm a person who's used to taking my body for granted. And I could no longer take for granted. My energy. My gregariousness. I'm a very outgoing person. And all of a sudden, I became totally introverted and I had no energy whatsoever and I couldn't speak at all. I could read maybe, and I could write a little bit, but I found having conversations really, really difficult and I had to stop chemo in the fifth cycle. I wasn't able to make it through the six cycles because I developed neuropathy. And I was really, really clear that I did not want to get neuropathy in my fingers since I type a lot since I'm a writer. I was OK with having a little bit in my toes, but fingers were totally out of the question. So, when I had a conference with my surgeon, she said “OK we'll stop at five [chemotherapy cycles]”. 

So that was chemo. Uhm, all of this took much more out of me than I thought. You know, as I said, I'm a healthy person, even though I was 72 years old. I hadn't really felt like I was 72. I felt more like I was about 52. I was pretty athletic. It just really hit me, and I was unprepared for how weak I felt and how much it affected my personality. It basically turned me into this other person whom I didn't know, so that was chemo and that and recovery from that took a lot longer than I thought it would. 

And then I had to do radiation. For some reason I was the most scared of radiation. I think that speaks to my generation. I grew up in the time of nuclear bomb shelters and exercises in elementary school of hiding under your desk, which makes no sense whatsoever, but that's what we did. 

And we read books like... Uhm, what was the name of that book? On the beach, where everybody who survives a nuclear war goes to Australia. Because that's the only place that doesn't get the mushroom cloud. And so. For some reason, I was terrified of radiation, and I had brachytherapy (a type of internal radiation therapy in which seeds, ribbons, or capsules that contain a radiation source are placed in your body, in or near the tumor) and that turned out to be the easiest part. It was easier than surgery. It was easier than chemo. It was certainly easier than having a stroke.  

So, but even that you know. For about probably six months of treatment and then it took me a good six months more to really get back to any semblance of how I considered myself to be when I'm normal. Uhm, I don't think. Uhm, certainly not at my age I think it's very, very hard to go back to the person you were before you had cancer. 

In my case I have a symptom that's there all the time and that's the neuropathy in my toes. That will never go away. It's a numbness I can live with it. It doesn't prevent me from walking, but I'm am very careful now when I go up and down stairs. And certainly, if I'm hiking or if I'm walking in the woods, I really pay attention to where my feet are. 

00:29:22 Nicole 

And your hands, you're all good there? There was no lasting [effects]? 

00:29:26 Helen 

My hands are great. My hands are really, really good. 

What's really strange for me you don't realize it because you've never seen me before, but I used to have long, straight hair. They were not super straight. Not as straight to Stephanie's, but pretty straight. And after chemo my hair grew back curly. It's the same color that it was before, but it's really, really curly. And when I touched my head, I feel like I'm touching my husband's head because he has curly hair. And that's extremely disorienting looking in the mirror and not seeing the person who was there before cancer. The whole thing with hair was very interesting to me. 

Uhm, when I first got diagnosed, everybody talked to me about hair. I mean it was like hair was more important than the tumor. You know everybody was talking about “well, do you want a wig, what kind of wig? Do you want a scarf? It's gonna be summer. You're gonna sweat.” Blah blah blah blah... And even though I'm the generation of hair.  You know, hair was the musical of my generation, I really couldn't care less about my hair. 

I cared more about whether I was going to feel good again. So, all of these things had a tremendous psychological impact on. I think anyone who goes through it experiences this kind of reckoning of figuring out what's really important to you because you're stripped down to like the bare bones. Very often you know you can't really talk very much. You can't really eat very much. You can't do anything for a while, and so you sit there, and you think OK, what's really important to me? And I found that. Uhm, it really shook out my friendship list. I really discovered the give and take between friends, friends I had and what I put into the relationship and what they put into the relationship. Because I never really thought about friendship a lot. I always had lots of friends and didn't analyze it very much and I was surprised how cancer affected friendships in so many different ways.  

Uh, so that was one area. And the other thing was. I mean, you know your family there's so many people in your family and you don't really think. Or at least I never really analyzed the family dynamics, because I have a relatively large family. I have two brothers. They're both married, so I have two sisters. Uhm, I never was particularly interacted with my sisters in law. And yet during cancer suddenly they stepped up and they were there all the time. It was really nice, and it was really unexpected. I have two sons. My sons reacted in wildly different ways. My sons are in their 30s. One of them unfortunately has two close friends whose mothers both died of cancer in the last two years. So, he was terrified that I was going to be number three. And he wound up calling almost every night. Uhm, my other son texted me once and disappeared. So, you never can tell. 

00:33:33 Nicole 

Yeah, everybody handles it differently. Very individual experience, so if we go back to the memoir for a minute, was there something that sparked inspiration for you? Or, you know, what motivated you to write this book? 

00:33:52 Helen 

What motivated me? Was that as I said, I'm not a numbers person. What I really wanted when I was diagnosed was, I want somebody who had gone through the experience to tell me what to expect. In fact, didn't want how to I didn't want advice. But I wanted somebody to go through it with me and tell me this is what happened to me. This is what's possible. This is what worked for me. Uhm, this is what didn't work for me and that would have been super helpful to me. I had a little bit of that because of course by the time you're 72 in North America, you know lots of people who've had cancer. I also went to an all-girls high school. So very early on I had the smart idea of announcing on our LISTSERV(email List management software) on our class LISTSERV that I had been diagnosed. There were 150 of us on the list and 30 of them had had cancer and so they started writing in. Doing some of that, telling me some of their experience. The main event. And then my next-door neighbor who was older than I was had cancer. Three times and she was a great source of information. So, I realized that sharing information and asking for tips was a really good thing to a certain degree. I also was very clear that with all of the people I knew that I had very good medical attention and I didn't want to be swamped with information. I wanted answers to questions that I had and I didn't want unsolicited advice. So, I would ask for example, what do you suggest to do in terms of creating an environment to convalesce? What should I wear to chemo, you know? Very specific questions. And that worked really well for me. So, when I wrote the book, I tried not to give unsolicited advice and say you should do this you should do that. I said instead I did this, I did that, but everybody is different. And you have to decide what you need and what you want and also what you want to know.  I mean some people want to know a lot more than I want. To know and some people want to know a lot less, so it's extremely individual. I think one size never fits all with cancer. 

00:36:42 Nicole 

No, it definitely doesn't. I love that that's your reasoning behind writing the book. I think in a way this podcast was something similar when I originally expressed that idea, because I had a few women that I had connected with that were just invaluable to me to have their support and their previous experience. And whether you just whether you're looking for ideas of you know what to wear to chemo as you said, or just somebody to like, validate or listen or hear, who knows what the experience. You know you can talk to other people in your life who haven't had cancer and they're supportive as well. But there's something just a bit different in conversing with somebody who's been through it, and that level of understanding or support that they seem to be able to offer you. I think it is really powerful for people going through their journey, or at least I found it. 

00:37:52 Helen 

I actually have a very old friend, a former college classmate of mine who lives way away from here. She lives in the Middle East, and she just wrote me that she's in chemo now and she goes to her transfusions with my book. She said, “She finds it a godsend to be sitting there having an infusion and reading what I felt when I had infusion”. And that's really the best reaction I could imagine. 

00:38:30 Nicole 

That's so impactful. 

00:38:32 Stephanie 

Yeah, that's so amazing. I think I uhm Nikolai go back to when you were talking about how this this idea of the podcast also came when you were sitting in that chemo chair getting your infusions. So, I think it's kind of like a companion taking you along. You know having all these stories and these tidbits of really personal stuff that often times our medical systems aren't able to provide that level of shared support and understanding. 

So just to wrap things up, Helen, I'm curious if you could give one piece of advice to someone who's going through endometrial cancer right now. What would that piece of advice be? 

00:39:21 Helen 

I think really be in touch with what you need. And people need so many different things. Some people need to be left totally alone. Some people need tremendous amounts of interaction with other people. Some people need their children. Some people don't want their children to know what's going on. The variation is tremendous, so I think the most important thing is to figure out what you need. Not what your partner or your friend or your brother or your sister or your mother or your child tells you need. But what you need and then get it. 

00:40:09 Stephanie 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's such great advice for everyone I feel like whenever folks give advice, I think it resonates so much across the board. So yeah, that is wonderful advice. 

Well, thank you so much Helen for coming on the GOSH podcast and for sharing your story. It was such a pleasure to hear about your experience with endometrial cancer, especially during the pandemic. 

And thank you for writing this wonderful memoir that you've put out! We'll definitely be including links to where folks can access this wonderful book in our show notes and in our social media. So please feel free to check it out and thank you once again, Helen, for coming on and sharing your story with us today! 

00:41:01 Helen 

Thank you! It was a pleasure! 

00:41:04 Stephanie 

Thanks for joining us on the gosh podcast to learn more about the gynecological cancer initiative and our podcast! Make sure to check out our website at gynecancerinitiative.ca